General admission for Gingrich-Cain debate: $200 per ticket

Chris Moody

Political Reporter

The TicketOctober 27, 2011

Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich will go head to head in their own "Lincoln-Douglas" style debate in a few weeks, but if you want to see it live, it's going to cost a pretty penny.

General admission to the event costs $200, according to the Texas Patriots PAC, the nonprofit group that's organizing the debate at the Woodlands Resort and Conference Center near Houston, Texas. To attend a VIP cocktail party after the debate, attendees are asked to pay $500 or $1,000 a pop, depending on the seat. Students can come for $150.

"We're not trying to get rich off it," PAC spokeswoman Gena Cook told Yahoo News. "But we are a nonprofit PAC, so we just need to get it paid for."

She pointed to the cost of the conference room at the resort as the reason for the high price of admission.

"There is considerable overhead," Gena said. "We don't want to be hogs. . . . We can't afford to pay for it ourselves."

The candidates must also pay their own way to the debate, she went on to say, and will not be compensated for participating.

Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, has wanted to hold a debate fashioned after the famous traveling match-ups between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in 1858. The Gingrich-Cain debate will be a modified version of the 19th-century forum in which one candidate spoke for an hour, followed by a 90 minute rebuttal from the second contender and finished with a 30-minute speech from the first candidate.

This event, however, will only last an hour and half, and will be simulcast online.